Announcing a New SF Masterwork!

Today is Ian Watson’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Ian!), which seems as good a reason as any to devote today’s post to his Gateway Essentials titles, don’t you think?

First, some background: Ian Watson was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, on April 20th, 1943 and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first class Honours degree in English Literature (not right away, of course, you’ll be relieved to learn that he did spend some time growing up and going to school, first).He lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish SF with ‘Roof Garden Under Saturn’ for the influential New Worlds magazine in 1969.

Watson became a full-time writer in 1976, following the success of his debut novel The Embedding. His work has been frequently shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and he has won the BSFA Award twice. From 1990 to 1991 he worked full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I.Artificial Intelligence (directed after Kubrick’s death by Steven Spielberg), for which he is acknowledged in the credits for Screen Story. In the April 2001 edition of Interzone, he published the astonishingly prescient story ‘Hijack Holiday’ in which terrorists crashed a commercial flight into the Eiffel Tower.

As you might gather from the above, Ian Watson is quite a writer! But with some thirty novels and over 200 stories spread across twenty collections, where does one start? Well, there’s always the Gateway Essentials, designed to solve just such a conundrum:

And, of course, we’ve carefully selected our SF Masterworks to represent not just the best examples of the genre, but the best entry points. Which seems as good place as any to announce that Ian Watson’s debut novel, The Embedding, is to be published as an SF Masterwork in September!